Is the 3-Year Degree Dream Becoming a Reality?
HEADLINES
Is the 3-Year Degree Dream Becoming a Reality? (Inside Higher Ed, July 28, 2025) Colleges from Utah to Indiana and Maine are on track to offer three-year degrees in the near future. But the hesitations that have long plagued the movement haven’t disappeared. Many accreditors have already approved programs, including the country’s first in-person reduced-credit degrees: computer science, criminal justice, graphic design and hospitality management at Johnson & Wales University, which were approved by the New England Commission of Higher Education and will launch this fall.
What Happens When Politics Rewrites Medical Education? (American Council on Science and Health, ACSH.org, July 28, 2025) A new accreditation body, claiming to prioritize student outcomes and transparency, has emerged amidst a U.S. healthcare provider shortage. Despite many states enrolling their public universities, the true motivations and potential impact of this body remain questionable.
Accreditation ensures a certain standard for educational institutions.
“Accreditation” refers to the evaluation of the quality of higher education institutions and their programs. In the United States, accreditation is a major way that students, families, government officials, and the press know that an institution or program provides a quality education.” – Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
Without accreditation, anyone could open any school with no expectation of the quality of education provided. Accreditation is the tool we have developed to prevent and combat “diploma mills.” Accreditation organizations have played an important role in ensuring specific educational standards.
Managing Political Risk. Five Things Every President and Board can do to Optimize their Position (Inside Higher Ed, July 28, 2025) Does your university have a strategy to manage political risk? In the past, you probably did not need one. Federal higher education policy has been relatively stable for the last 80 years. Decade after decade, since the unanimous passage of the GI Bill in 1944, both parties in Congress supported generous student aid, subsidies for university research, tax exemption, and liberal immigration rules for foreign students. Further changes, particularly to accreditation, have been promised. To state the obvious, these massive changes in the regulatory environment have immense financial and operational implications for colleges and universities across the higher education sector. They also suggest that higher education leaders can no longer take politics for granted.
Louisiana Seeks to Join Florida’s New Accreditor (Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2025) Louisiana will join the new accrediting body that Florida established earlier this month in conjunction with five other states, according to an executive order signed by Gov. Jeff Landry. Last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced the formation of the new accreditor, the Commission for Public Higher Education (CHPE). CPHE’s business plan stated that the idea originated from “growing dissatisfaction with current practices among the existing institutional accreditors and the desire for a true system of peer review among public institutions.”
CHEA WEBINAR -- AI in U.S. Higher Education – Transforming Student Success and Campus Operations Thursday, August 7, 2025, 2:00 p.m. ET. Explore how Generative AI is transforming higher education in this exclusive webinar. AWS leader Mary Strain, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Strategist, will share practical use cases—from classrooms to fundraising—and offer insights on responsible implementation, governance, and building AI-ready institutions. Don’t miss this timely opportunity to advance your institution or organization for the future of AI. Click here to register to attend today!